Control Drones with Your Phone

07 Mar Control Drones with Your Phone

Although UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have been available to consumers since the early 2000s, they’ve only become affordable for the average Joe in recent years. People use drones for a variety of creative (and usually legal) ways like exploring abandoned buildings, checking out their crops, and searching the neighborhood for a lost pet. An even more contemporary technology is the ability to operate a drone with a smartphone instead of a traditional controller. Here are the top 3 iOS and Android apps for operating drones:

Ghost Drone

With this app you simply have to point to a destination on a smartphone map and the drone will travel there automatically. The live camera feed from the drone goes directly to the smartphone which allows the user to take precise pictures!

AR.FreeFlight 2.2

This app is compatible with the Parrot drones. A UAV’s height, direction, and speed are controlled by tilting the smartphone. Trick moves like dives and flips are simple to maneuver with the intuitive controls! The recordings from the drone’s video camera is also instantly downloaded to the smartphone as soon as the UAV lands.

DroneDeploy

Unlike the others on this list, the DroneDeploy app is compatible with any UAV (including some DIY drones). A favorite of farmers, crop scouters, and anyone else in the agricultural industry, UAVs operated by DroneDeploy can fly over crops and take high-resolution images. Through cloud software operated over a cellular modem, 3D maps are then created in real-time from the stitched together color images. With this information, which users get instantly while the drone is still midflight, farmers can notice patterns typically unseen at the ground level: weed development, fertilizer overlap, and other valuable data that could influence when and where they plant.

Android users will soon be able to operate DroneDeploy courtesy of the app developers at CodigoDelSur! Drones are quickly becoming a favorite toy or tool for businesses looking for a new delivery method, or a consumer who lacks a ladder tall enough to check that water stain on the roof!